Sticking Doors and Windows in New Braunfels

What the ground under New Braunfels does to a door frame

Krum is the series on record for New Braunfels, deep valley-fill clay that collected at the foot of the slopes. It is rated high shrink-swell, with a linear extensibility of 8.4 percent, the laboratory measure of how much a sample changes length between soaked and dried out. At that rating the clay moves a slab edge through the season rather than holding it still. Altoga, Barbarosa and Houston Black soils turn up around the valley too, so two houses a few streets apart can behave nothing alike. When a stretch of slab perimeter rides down, the wall on it leans, every opening in that wall skews, and the doors along it catch at the same corner. The door is the shape it always was. The hole changed. The geometry in full is on foundation repair for sticking doors, the national page for this symptom.

Why the river corridors and the higher ground behave differently

New Braunfels holds two moisture stories inside one city, and doors report them differently. Along the Comal and the Guadalupe the water under the ground sits higher and keeps moving, so the clay beside the water never dries all the way out and never fully reloads. Those slabs see smaller seasonal swings, but they get damp air and damp framing for long stretches, so doors swell, stick for a few weeks, and come back on their own. Up off the valley floor the same clay runs the whole cycle, drying hard through the back half of summer and recharging when the rain arrives. That version shows up as frames that drift one way and stay drifted, a little worse each year. Which lot you are standing on changes what a stuck door means. The wider geology, including the limestone side west of I-35, is on our New Braunfels service area page.

Windows that stick for reasons the slab has nothing to do with

Windows rack the way doors do, because they are openings in the same walls, and a window binding at a corner near a cluster of sticky doors backs up what the doors are saying. One wrinkle belongs to windows alone. Metal frames grow in the heat, so a window that drags on a hot afternoon and slides the next morning is thermal expansion, and no pier will change it. Check a stiff window early and late in the day before you count it as evidence. If the walls around those openings crack diagonally from the corners, that is the drywall describing the same racking, and we have written up what cracks above doors and windows mean.

What the free inspection measures

The checks above tell you whether to measure. The free inspection does the measuring. An ICC-certified inspector works through every door and window you flagged, at the gap wedge, the strike plate and the frame corners, then shoots floor elevations across the house and maps where the slab actually sits. If the sticky openings line up with a real low area, the map shows it and you get a written scope and a price. If they line up with nothing, that answer gets written down too, with the readings and the date on it, so next summer you are comparing numbers instead of memories. About a third of our inspections end with no repair needed at all.

What the repair costs when the floor turns out to be the cause

When the readings confirm settlement under the cluster of stuck openings, the work is piers along the low section, priced by pier count. We set steel and hybrid piers only, and both run $600 to $1,000 each installed. How many you need follows how much of the perimeter dropped, not how many doors are sticking, and a single settled corner usually needs a handful rather than a full perimeter. Warranty on the piers is lifetime and it transfers with the house, and a year later we are back for the performance follow-up inspection with the level on the floor again. The full math is in our cost guide. Doors generally start latching again as the lift brings the frames back toward square.

If it turns out to be the weather

Plenty of these calls end with sandpaper. One swollen door through a damp stretch wants a plane and some patience, not a repair scope, and anyone selling piers off the back of a single sticky door is selling. Where the clay is drying out hard around the perimeter in a long dry spell, a steady soaker-hose routine does more than any interior fix, and foundation watering on Texas clay covers how to run one.